Processing freshly-killed poultry has become an increasingly mechanized operation. Chicken or other fowl are placed on shackles moved by an overhead conveyor in the typical modern poultry processing plant, and the freshly-killed fowl thus are conveyed through various processing stages in the plant. Poultry processing equipment and techniques generally are well-known to those skilled in the art.
During a typical poultry processing operation, the fresh ova are harvested or removed from the fowl and separately processed or packaged for sale to large-scale users of egg yolks. Removal of ova from the fowl generally takes place on the processing line before the fowl are inspected for indications of disease or other irregularities not meeting prevailing health standards. If a fowl fails the health inspection, the ova previously removed from that fowl likewise are suspect, and cannot be used for human consumption. In order to be able to discard the ova earlier removed from a rejected fowl, it thus becomes necessary to be able to identify with some accuracy the ova removed from each particular fowl, so as to avoid the need for discarding a large number of ova.
One known technique for associating ova with a particular fowl employs a separate ova-collecting cup fastened to each individual bird-holding shackle on the conveyor line. The ova are manually removed from each fowl, and that operator must place the ova from each fowl into the shackle-mounted cup carrying that fowl. If a particular fowl thereafter fails inspection on the processing line, the ova-collecting cup on that shackle is manually dumped to discard the ova previously removed from the rejected fowl. All the cups are automatically dumped at a subsequent point on the conveyor line, for collecting the ova removed from fowl that passed inspection. Because these cups are of necessity relatively small, and because ova are naturally slippery and difficult to grasp, the ova frequently are dropped or otherwise mishandled and thus are wasted. Furthermore, the conveyor lines in poultry processing plants of any size have a large number of bird-holding shackles, requiring a corresponding investment in providing and maintaining the ova collecting cups associated with these shackles. Moreover, these cups must be periodically cleaned, along with the rest of the bird-handling equipment, requiring an additional expense to the processing plant operator.
Another known technique for collecting ova calls for separating the ova into substantial batches, e.g., forty or so ova, and placing the batch into a separate collecting tube. The fowl providing ova for each collecting tube also are identified by batch. If a single fowl in a batch subsequently fails to pass the health inspection, all ova in that batch must then be discarded. The waste inherent in this prior-art technique is apparent.